The Second Sunday of Easter-The Rev Melanie Lemburg

 2^nd Sunday of Easter—Year A

April 16, 2023

I have to admit that I am quite squeamish about today's gospel reading. There are numerous artists’ renderings of the scene when Thomas encounters the Risen Christ, and I really have trouble spending much time with those also. There's the famous Caravaggio painting, where Thomas sticks his finger in the slit that is the wound in Jesus's side while the other disciples gather around looking, and there's even a banner that used to hang on the belltower of the Cathedral where I attended as a child that shows Thomas coming toward Jesus's wounded side with an outstretched finger (which one of my friends has dubbed the "Tickle me Jesus banner." )

           I thought about why this image makes me uncomfortable, and I think it is the same type of squeamishness that would make my stomach do a flip-flop when my daughter used to tell me how she ripped her loose tooth out at the lunch table in the cafeteria. I just don't really want to think about anybody probing anybody else's wounds, no matter how worthy the cause.

But it’s still kind of weird, right?  Thomas, who is out living his life and isn’t locked up in fear with the rest of the disciples, doesn’t get to see the Risen Christ when he first appears to the rest of them.  So, what does Thomas ask for?  He says he needs to both see and touch Jesus’s wounds in order to believe that he has been resurrected from the dead.  And this is what is truly significant:   The Risen Christ is recognized by his disciples because of his wounds. The resurrection has not miraculously removed his hurt, his betrayal, his suffering. Even though he has defeated death, he still maintains its scars. When the Resurrected Christ first visits the disciples all together, he offers them his wounds as evidence of who he is. In his offering up his wounds as proof of who he is, Jesus furthers his teaching (for his disciples and for us) about what it means to be his follower, his disciple. 

I heard a bishop interpret this years ago saying, "When we give ourselves to God, we don't just offer our best; we offer God our all, our everything."

That includes our joy and our gifts and our hope and our new life, and it also includes our wounds and our scars, our suffering and our sorrow.

And notice what happens when Jesus has offered Thomas his wounds? Thomas replies with not only recognition but with a statement of faith: "My Lord and my God!" It is the climax in the Gospel of John, and Thomas becomes the apostle who articulates the new faith, the good news after the resurrection.

But what happens to us when we offer God our all? Ernest Hemmingway has a line in one of his books that says, "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." As Christians, we believe that it is only through giving our all to God, offering to God all ourselves even our wounds as Christ did (to God and to his disciples), then God takes us and makes us a new creation, resurrected and remade and strong at our broken places.

In that way we become both believers and witnesses to the resurrection in our own lives and those who walk this way with us, and we become evangelists of the good news of God's salvation in our words and even more importantly in our very being.

        Every week, I get a subscription email from On Being, a podcast by Krista Tippett.  She reflects on the episode of her podcast that is coming out and some of the wisdom that she has gleaned from the person she interviewed.  This week, she has released the episode when she interviews the US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, and here’s what she writes about it:

        “We talk a lot at On Being about the word ‘healing,’ the meaning of healing, and how it is distinct from, and interwoven with, words that are used with greater fluency in our world: fixing, curing, closure.”

        She continues, “I love that the Surgeon General of the United States has had a deep, intentional orientation to healing from his earliest life with his father, also a physician, and his mother, who helped run their medical practice. He defines it this way: ‘Healing is about making whole. To be a healer, you have to be able to listen, to learn, and to love. And I saw those three forces at work in my parents, and how they cared for their patients.’”

        Tippett goes on to reflect on a learning she gained from Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, who also influenced Dr. Murthi writing, “she was the first person, early in this adventure, to bring home to me this connection between healing and wholeness. She gave voice to counterintuitive truths I’ve seen embodied in wise and graceful lives ever since. Healing — becoming whole — is not about eradicating our wounds and weaknesses. It emerges in and through them. ‘The way we deal with loss,’ [Dr. Remen has] written, ‘shapes our capacity to be present to life more than anything else.’

        Tippet concludes, “ The other side of this is that when we don’t deal with our losses — when we suppress them, wish them away, power through — they ‘distance us from life’ and continue to define us.”

        On this Second Sunday of Easter, what would it mean for us to be like Thomas and to dwell for a bit with the way Jesus has been wounded and made whole again for us in his resurrection?  What might it look like for us to dwell for a bit with our own wounds and to look for the ways that God has already offered us healing and wholeness?